


i know time will slow

by la_victorienne



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-08
Updated: 2008-07-08
Packaged: 2018-10-16 00:40:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10560468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_victorienne/pseuds/la_victorienne
Summary: watching ianto play piano, jack wonders if there's anything he can't do. also there is sex.





	

In the starlight, Ianto is playing Moonlight Sonata.

Jack pads in bare feet and a wayward pair of pants out of bed, down the silver hall, and into the living room, eyes transfixed by Ianto's hands. They seem more delicate splayed over the keys of his precious baby grand than they do clutching a gun or tapping on a computer keyboard, and Jack wonders for a moment if Ianto really can do _everything_. The thought, for once, makes him feel woefully inadequate as a person and as a hero, and the twinge of jealousy he feels afterwards is deeply satisfying, deeply human. Ianto just plays on, aware of Jack's presence but uncaring if he sees, and even the air in the room is still, listening.

His mind is filled with the blinding light of summer on the peninsula, in among the dunes even though he's been told time and again to keep away from the razor grass, lest he get cut. Gray laughs behind him and he is the Gray he was meant to be, older and unravaged. He is a brother, not an enemy, locked in the freezer until an alternate means of neutralization is realized or until Jack Harkness himself dies for good. They embrace on the patch of sand they once called home, and Jack does not cry again for what might have been, instead closing his eyes to thank anything he can, if anything exists, for what is happening now.

When Ianto is finished, when Ianto has played the song six times in a row and Jack is still not tired of hearing it, Ianto puts Beethoven's soul on repeat to echo through the entire house, a speaker in every room, and pushes Jack up against a wall, their fingers entwined and bodies close. They move more slowly than ever before, their tentative exhalations brought out in unison as if to minimize the interruption to the music, and they create their own masterful composition of lips, hands, tongues. Jack closes his eyes to memorize the taste of the moment, consumed by a feeling of sanctuary he has never felt, not even in his almost two hundred years, and he knows how hopelessly he is tangled in Ianto himself, how impossible it is to extricate himself from the young man's future now.

“Tell me you love me,” he whispers into the masterpiece.

Ianto does not obey him, and for that, too, Jack is grateful.

Instead, Ianto presses a flutter of kisses on the left side of Jack's collarbone and brings Jack's hand up to his heart, to feel the hummingbird-quick ka-thump, ka-thump there as he grips Jack's hips and cants his own until Jack knows he'll have rug-burn tomorrow. Ianto's body alone strains to tell Jack the secret it holds until he cannot breathe any more, until the air goes white around them, until Jack knows he will remember this even into eternity. Until he knows he really has been missing something, all of these long years, something that Rose knew and Estelle knew and Greg and Marcel and Anthony and, and, and. Until he knows he wants to keep it, keep this, forever.

He whispers his own precious and dangerous secret into Ianto's sleeping body, folds it into the bends of elbow, of knee, of hip. He marks Ianto with the unspoken words, drumming himself into the skin so that his gift might someday be remembered, and fondly. And when he is done, and he has given all the life he has into Ianto with no hope of it being returned, he understands that, though he pretends it is, meeting the Doctor is neither the best nor the worst thing that has ever happened in his life, and that meeting Ianto Jones, his friend, his lover, and yes, perhaps even his love, is both.

The music fades into blackness and Jack finally sleeps, the nightmares finally gone.  



End file.
